Single Point of Failure
by MidnightCereal
Summary: Because I haven't milked the PTSD angle for all it's worth just yet. One shot. Take Two.


Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Single Point of Failure

By MidnightCereal

Misato didn't really like beer. There were just too many Girls Night Outs that she couldn't remember to say she hated it.

"Hold _still_, Shinji."

"Why?"

"Just do it."

Misato knew herself to be a woman of systems -a criminally mismanaged, crisscrossing, short-circuited rat's nest of warring, tribal proto-hubs, okay- but she liked to think the chaos itself was systemic, and that within it, beer was merely a placeholder. A simple, vital node through which the day was shuffled, filtered, and filed. It could have been coffee, or dividing square roots by odd-numbered denominators, or even balancing a stack of penny coins because, hey, it worked for Big Ben.

But Misato had no coffee filters, and she'd be damned if she had to stare at that grinning bean farmer and his fucking mule at 6:30 in the morning. She hated math. She wasn't a clock. Therefore, the day had been effectively lost when she had opened the door to the refrigerator, and could see clear to the back. At first, Misato hadn't been as upset as she'd been amazed. _No_ beer? _None?_ Wow. How'd that happen? Who drank it all? It was up there with the Yeti and Pussy Mountain. And somehow, work had been even harrier.

"What're you doing back there?"

"I'm concentrating, that's what. Shush."

Misato hadn't been prepared to deal with Commander Ikari, who'd personally wanted to know why she, alone, had authorized payment of fifty-seven billion yen to the U.N. for damages incurred during the initial sortie against the Seventh Angel. So she'd stood there in his office with thick, stupid words crushed against the back of her teeth by the viscous drift from her mind. Despite her sober malaise, Misato had been pretty sure that "Der" wouldn't have kept her from being shot.

That had been her entire godforsaken day; furiously uprooting electronic money wires while intensely and traitorously empathizing with Allied sailors who'd set Okinawan skies ablaze to keep from being immolated by Kamikaze Zeroes. Kaji had later trespassed into her office with that liquid saunter of his. And it had looked as if he had something important to say, but by then she'd already hurled something with edges at him, just barely missing his spine…she always missed his spine.

And Ritsuko. Good ol', insufferably detached Ritsuko. It hadn't been that Misato was unappreciative of her oldest friend's attempt to moralize her heinous fuck up – wait, yes it had. Nevertheless, Misato had still found enough class to tell Ritsuko to shut the hell up, that she was way too tired to decipher what the hell she was actually saying, and to go write a thesis. Or something like that.

Misato had flounced out at seven, with Maya Ibuki's laptop and an engorged manila folder tucked under a soaked armpit. It had been unconventional, and rude, and a bit illegal, but if she had had to stay another second in that pit of voles, she would have burst into flames. And then taken everybody with her.

She had forgotten a six-pack of placeholder in the mad profanity-laced sojourn from work, alternately scrolling, screeching or swearing past a slew of trusted booze proprietors. By the time Misato had crashed into her dining room chair and began savaging Shinji's chicken tempura…well…she was already in her dining room. Eating. Home. And she was staying home. Shit, dinner had been over for an hour and she still hadn't left her seat.

She could always ask Shinji to take a couple yen and procure a case (or keg) at the complex convenience store couched on the first floor; Mister Hasegawa was used to Shinji's round, cherubic face. Mister Hasegawa was used to not having the wrath of the most powerful paramilitary organization the world has ever known brought down upon his super fresh comb over like an army of nano-lice.

Right there was the bad luck within good luck that Asuka was getting along with Shinji, who sat on the floor in a patient but fidgeting seiza. She crowded behind him on the couch, her blue eyes set with cool purpose where before they had zipped around the room like shiftless twin hornets. Misato was certain this all qualified as a miracle, and wasn't about to interrupt…whatever the hell they were actually doing.

"What tickles…?"

"Relax, I'm almost finished."

_Almost Finished_, starring Asuka's pincered, manicured fingers primed over the boy's bare back, as Misato added 'sandwich' to the list of things the Third Child could use to improve his self esteem.

Well, then. If all it took for treatise was to groom each other like a couple of hairless antisocial monkeys, Misato could take a rain check on the oxymoron drinking game just this once.

Shinji screamed.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?! DID YOU JUST BURN ME?!"

"It's _acupuncture_," Asuka tiredly informed him. "The burning means that it's working."

At about this time, Misato put her head down. _Down_. For some reason she wouldn't merge with the tacky orange juice stain pasted on the table. But she said nothing and Shinji, bless his bashful little heart, didn't acknowledge her as he gusted by and likely fished for a school of ice cubes in the freezer, if that clacking sound was any indication.

"Ice? Oh, come _on_…" Asuka was closer, more annoying. "You had your spine residually broken in three places less than a week ago."

"But you _really_ stuck a _real_ needle in the middle of my back!"

"And you are _real_ close to implying I'm incompetent, which would be a lie. You wouldn't _lie _to me, would you, Shinji?"

"Wha...no, I just-"

"I bet you didn't even realize it's still in there, did you?"

"It _is_…? OW!"

"Alright," breathed Asuka. "_Okay_, stop touching it." Warmth had trickled in between her words, which Misato would have found adorable had the girl not kept banging her bony hip into the table. _Brrump_. "Hold still. No, _here_, let me-"

"No! Don't touch me! I'll get a mirror!"

"Turn back around!" Asuka commanded. _Brrump._ "Hey!"_Brrump._ "I'm talking to you!" _Brrump. Brrump. Brrump._"Will you stop being such a crybaby?!"

"I'm not crying!"

_**Brrump.**_

"Shinji, stop crying and let the damn girl take the damn needle out, dammit!"

There. That'll show them. Or momentarily stun them into silence. Misato was sighing into the crevice between her folded arms, so couldn't tell which. She ended up explaining, "That was the long, stupid day talking, and I didn't mean to take it out on you. You know that, don't you?"

"Sure. Um…" The smile in his voice trailed off, agitation already swirling down into the reservoir he maintained to store everything that slighted, irked, or ventilated him. "Forget it. It's okay, really."

And just like that, for the moment, at least, it was okay.

"No it's not!" Sigh. "Misato, why don't you quit smelling your armpit and look at him? You just bitched him out for no good reason. He's about to hit something!"

"No I'm not!"

Shockingly, Asuka wasn't listening. "Shinji's his own little Second Impact waiting to happen. To _us_. If there's anyone who needs to have needles jabbed into him to gradually reduce stress, it's him."

Misato whimpered, wanting nothing more than to examine the rainbow cultures breeding behind her eyes. So pretty.

Oh, the hell with it. She may not have had any control, but that didn't mean she couldn't fake it. "Asuka…did you even hear what you just said? Never in my life have I heard a girl make so many elaborate excuses to touch a boy."

"That's not…no…but see, that's…hey, shut up! I can tell you're smirking at me!"

_Hackles…rising…_

"So what if I am?" growled Misato.

"What do you mean? _You're_ the one that's forcing us to all live here under the same roof."

"Funny." Not really. "I seem to recall the Seventh Angel exploding after fifty-two seconds of combat ballet. So tell me why I don't have your ass crated to Rei's for remedial synch training."

"I'd totally harm her."

Misato hadn't committed to dragging the argument further down until Asuka's prophetic tone rattled around her addled brain.

_Totally?_ Yes. Completely. Wholly. Utterly. But Katsuragi liked _unilateral_ more, how its special edition gloss polarized different points of view. Asuka was about to hate the word. "Actually, I was thinking of a reason that doesn't involve you being shipped back to Bavaria."

"That's _any_ reason, Misato." The girl scoffed disappointedly, and Misato would have given her left girl for a bit of that chutzpah to go down the wrong pipe. "I'm a seeded player and you know it."

"You're the property of Nerv, is what you are," Misato snapped. "Until the war is over, you and Shinji and Rei belong to us, and the most you can ever do about it is go back home!"

Did that do it? Was it over? Was Gendo Ikari a great father? Or did all it mean was that Asuka would wheel from one target to the other? "Are you hearing this? You're just going to stand there and let her talk to us like that?"

Fuck it.

"I was talking to _you_, Asuka! I was making the point that this is where we came in and it's where I wanted you to get off, and somehow you missed it. So I'll make it clear; I swear to you, if you don't leave him alone I will put your lights _way_._Out!_"

She wouldn't wait for compliance this time. Misato was knifing up to staple the point to Asuka's gigantic forehead when the building made a sound. Like it had been debating some source of civic contention within its brotherhood of utilities. Weighing points and counterpoints argued by plaster, gypsum board and steel members. Flickering with new doubt. Humming in uneasy concurrence. Finally coming to a consensus.

And plunging its residents into total darkness. Rejoice. The system works.

"I need a beer…"

* * *

They were right about one thing: Familiar items assumed new and wonderfully exotic shapes in the dark. For instance, the television and cart on which it was perched conspired to form a stout black blotch in the corner. On the other hand, Pen-Pen's monolithic mini-fridge squatted stubbornly on the floor, a stout black blotch in the corner.

Misato was comforted by the fact that her eyes had not yet adjusted; she never wanted to be used to something she hated so much.

Unfortunately, Nerv's liaison to Tokyo Electric Power Company in Tokyo-3 was the only excuse she had to bask in the neon blue keys backlit on the telephone receiver. Even then she had to whirl from it to hiss at Asuka's ventriloquized bitching. "Come on, I'm trying to hear this!"

Hear? Sure. Understand? Um. Er. The man on the other end of the corded line shared a terminal affliction with Ritsuko Akagi. Misato liked to call it Jargonitis, usually to Ritsuko's face, and it metastasized otherwise lucid and linear explanations with mitotic portmanteaus. As if anyone gave a shit what _intellectronics_ meant. In the end, everything inevitably sounded like 'THIS IS MY SEX'.

"It's not the breakers," Misato told him, "we made sure. I-we just want to know when the power's going to…" She made a face she was glad no one could see. "Are you for real?...No…No, that's alright. No, thank _you_."

She watched the blue eclipse slip into the plastic cradle until she could no longer. Then she watched it some more, but the afterimage refused to be seared into her unlike "Misato?"

"Shinji, Jesus!" She jumped. Her hand navigated the range of scars and squabbling stomach to their south, and then her forehead. "I'm so _off_, today. What was I doing?"

"You were threatening the last best hope humanity has in its intractable war against a race of xenocidal giants with domestic abuse," reminded Asuka.

Misato glowered blindly. "Don't flatter yourself…and stop rolling your eyes at me."

"I…_how did you know?_"

"You don't think there's been an attack, do you?" asked Shinji.

Misato had been ready to have that asked, she _had_, and her heart still rushed up her throat; when _that_ bell went off, you had better drool. "Section 2 and our liaison to TEPCO both say no. Word is the plant in New Yokohama had sagging power lines that came into contact with some overgrown trees, and I don't know, some node in the power grid failed, and…something else about loads cascading, and _I don't know_…"

She glanced at the black blotch in the corner. "Asuka, help me out here! You're good at crap like this, right?"

"Not until you tell me how you knew I was rolling my eyes!"

"At least you won't have to pay for this," said Shinji. "I mean, the next time your electric bill comes around, so there's a bright side, isn't there?"

Misato laughed, but it was like worn brake pads on a ten-speed. Patting the air down into the plush arm of her sofa, she lowered herself. "Maybe. But no amount of positivity's going to get those transaction nullification forms processed. Not without that flashlight I can't seem to find."

Misato just barely made out Shinji shaking his head. "I already checked. The batteries are dead."

"Oh...really?"

"Sorry."

"Oh…" This time, it came out as single-digit granules of sound trickling down a glass waist. Misato savored each one, counted them all, because the rest of the day was beginning to stretch out before her in an all too familiar and finite loop.

The scar was the tapped, tortured roots of a tree by the time Asuka bleated disgustedly. "_Ew_. Okay, something just touched my leg. Ikari, where are you?"

Misato shook her head. "Don't _tell her_, Shinji…"

"By the curio, why?" An object of considerable mass hurtled by Misato's ear. "OW! But I'm all the way over here! How could I have-"

Misato let herself up as the unilateral bickering began anew.

She should broker something, shouldn't she? Hadn't she championed this cause no more than fifteen minutes ago?

Hadn't the lights been on fifteen minutes ago?

Misato turned her back and breathed a sullen farewell to them. She neither knew nor cared if they'd heard her, focusing instead on her blind footfalls, on the world narrowing to a dry throat between the living room and her bedroom. On refusing to be swallowed by it. She already needed a frame of reference, and was exceedingly thankful for the warm, feathery pillow she nearly put her foot through.

"WARK!"

"Sorry, Pen-Pen…"

The bird issued another profane squawk before tottering off in the opposite direction. He'd be alright. She wouldn't be if she didn't get to sleep. The path was always clearest in the dark and Misato knew with a brilliant clarity that she had to end this horrible day before it all started.

Again.

* * *

To Misato Katsuragi, Kaori Sawashiro had been the beautiful girl with the broken sally until the day she astonishingly skipped into homeroom; Aphrodite had exhaled. Then Kaori tried her damnedest to convince her of the virtues of having dozens of tiny pricks jabbed into your buttocks, which only resulted in the easiest joke Misato ever told in her life.

* * *

The funny thing about not being able to sleep was that you wanted to kill everything.

Ho ho.

It turned out the world made noise when you strip mined the crust of electricity, work, and exchanges where you discovered that slim-fit pants don't really make you look slim. In the soundtrack of life, these were the scratches on your forty-fives.

The only thing Misato had wanted to hear was the chilled whisper of central air which, of course, had expired along with the fridge and television. After an hour of treading backsweat, she had petulantly shuffled off her comforter, tank top and shorts, and rolled onto her stomach. After another hour of playing dead, she'd growled low in the back of her throat and flipped her pillow, a cool reprieve that miraculously hadn't freed her from the blissful doldrums that had started to embrace her.

Unlike the fleet of SDF VTOLs crapping teeth-rattling, Old Testament thunder three feet from her window. Nerv and Self Defense Force jump-jets used different turbines, made different, earsplitting sounds, she realized. Fascinating. A quick mental yellow sticky reminded her to find out where their children slept.

Misato again rolled onto her back, pouting at the missed opportunity and then the ceiling. She made the effort to determine whether it hung a couple meters or light years above her, but every time she got a handle on the distance, Asuka would say something.

Then Shinji would say something.

Then Asuka would say something. Loudly.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Rage.

It was hard not seeing herself and Kaji echoed in her two charges, aside from the skipping class. And the stealing. The drinking. The smoking. The getting high. The screwing for days and days on end without rest or inhibition or soap. Even though Misato recognized those excesses for the black boxes they were -processing loneliness so it smelled of ganja or single malt whisky- there hadn't been one razored moment when she'd realized they were children in her vein.

The insistent weight of greatness was warping them like soft steel. It was in Shinji's posture when those claxons hurtled through the city, in Asuka's tsunamic fury at the most trivial...anything. She could see them silently collapsing on themselves, their bones setting wrong so they could only get around on delinquency, mood-altering substances, or sex. If they were lucky.

But Misato refused to demonize the symptoms when she had coffee with the problem in the morning. Took orders from it. _Gave_ orders to it. Fixed its makeup in the restroom mirror. And it rarely uttered one pitying word or self-reprimand. Nerv was willfully and religiously ignorant of its own epidemiology.

It was about time that she said something…

"SHUT UP! OH MY GOD, WHY CAN'T YOU TWO SHUT UP?!"

"Sorry!"

"You reap what you sow, Katsuragi!"

"Wark!"

Wark you too, bitch. It was, like, fifteen o' clock.

* * *

And they knew that. Somehow get past all that anger and self-doubt, and they were generally good teenage children. Their conversation soldiered on, muted, before melting back into the cardinal silence that cloaked everything. Asuka might've been talking in her room, but by then white noise had tumbled overhead and taken Misato under. She was faintly, oddly aware that she could still breathe.

Couldn't she?

Misato timed her native heart on the taut skin across her ribs. She yanked humid air into her lungs, tossed it out. Her face twisted like she was waiting for a ride in a lawless warren. There had been a blowback of chicken tempura, Listerine, and not beer. It had been cool and close and wrong.

She crushed a dissident whimper and clambered out from the jaws of her reptilian brain, reclaiming the space that should have been there; her room may have been a dear lord what's that smell, sleep where you lay affair, but not a casket.

So Misato unlaced the fingers cupped over her roiling stomach, reaching beyond her mattress because she could and had to. Her hand sprawled through tortured back issues of _Petit_ _Comic_ and empty tin artifacts until she held the corded phone, dialed, and groaned.

"-_elling_ you, Hikari, she knew I was rolling my eyes at her. She didn't guess. It was pitch black, okay, and she said herself that she could barely see my out…" Asuka stopped, took a breath. Misato took a breath. "Who's this? Shinji? Oh my _God_, you have no clue how much pain you just enlisted for-"

"It's _me_."

"What do _you_ want?"

_To wring your neck._ "What do you think? Let me use the phone, okay?"

"How important could this possibly be? It's like ten past two."

"If it wasn't important I wouldn't be making a call at _ten past two_, now would I?"

"Asuka, _Asuka_, it's alright..." Ambassador Horaki's small, honeyed voice was like mom's, but nourished and irrepressibly buoyant, so not like mom's. "We're seeing our aunt in Kofu so I have to get up early, anyway. Just don't let that guy get to you, okay?"

There was a crest of dry, crumpled static.

"This better not be some booty call," warned Asuka.

"What guy?"

"Not Shinji, so you can take off your cape. And while you're at it, why don't you take your own advice and get off of _my_ back?!"

"Fine."

"Wine."

"_Fine_."

"I know I am."

"Fine!"

Click.

"_Fine!_"

Screw her. Why should she be demonized for feeling this way? For not wanting to be alone, now? _Entitlement_ had never entrenched itself in Misato's vocabulary, but the world owed her this much, with compound interest and no guilt trips from any prima donna foreign nationals.

Misato breathed deeply and dialed, managing to compartmentalize her irritation by the time Ritsuko picked up the other end of the line. "How'd you know I was still at work?"

Katsuragi rolled her eyes in the dark. "Come _on_, now." Then sighed. "You have a minute?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Ritsuko. "I mean, in between these synch data reports and my thesis I don't think I really have a whole min-"

Few things are more therapeutic than smashing a phone into its unsuspecting cradle. Yet all Misato could do afterwards was pin her knees between her chest and the night, smarting at the cruel fairness of her best friend's smartass quip.

"Bitch." The phone rang and she snatched it. "Bitch."

"You have just resolved to be a sober ball of meanness today, haven't you?"

"By today, do you mean yesterday?" asked Misato, "Or tomorrow, which is today?"

"You should be unconscious."

"Says the woman who's calling from work over two hours past midnight."

Ritsuko let out a crooked little puff. It was engine knock for smokers. "Perception is nine-tenths of the truth, Misato. It's only work if you hate it. Isn't that right, Maya?" Akagi's office convected cool conditioned air through the receiver and little else. "She said yes."

Misato at once felt exposed. Entombed. "I don't…she's in there with you?"

"She's all the way on the other side of the room and it's not like you're on speaker phone. And even if that weren't the case, let's pretend that she's an adult, okay? So what can't wait until the sun comes up?"

"See, that's the thing…" One runny breath tumbled out, "the power's out."

"Oh…" Ritsuko would be slipping into her high-backed chair, now, its plastic casters rocking back as her face thawed with familial concern. "So…you're hanging in there, I guess."

Misato searched her dusty backlog of maxims, attempting to turn a phrase that accurately described a scream that built up behind your tongue but you couldn't release because your mouth was too small for such a large sound. No, wait, she had it: "I guess…"

"Then you should've called me sooner. The surface and Geofront power grids have been segregated since the-for months. The lights haven't so much as flickered down here."

"I forgot about that. It's like I don't have contr-"

"Maya, did you hear anything? The power….topside, it's out…_yes_…" There was a distant, tortured groan as Ritsuko turned back to Misato. "So much for her recording Fourth Age Fridays on OrcMax." She tsked sympathetically. "First her laptop and now this. I wouldn't have asked the poor thing to stay if I'd known there wasn't going to be some sort of payoff."

"Then give her your credit hours, do something. Just promise to do it later, okay?"

"That sounds like a _great_ idea…" Like…how polio was great? "So tell me, launching into the only firsthand account of you-know-what on a dedicated, sensitive, and monitored line, you think that's a better or worse idea?"

"I think it's damn _dark_, Ritsuko." Frustration, suddenly heavy and bitter, chased tempura off Misato's tongue. "Know what? If you don't want to talk to me then you don't get to do that condescending little…_thing_ you do."

"What thing?"

"You're doing it now."

"No I'm not." Ritsuko laughed. Misato tried to punch her with her mind powers.

"Yes. You _are_."

"Maya, do I sound condescending? No, now…Maya says I don't."

"Yeah, let's go ask our _immediate_ _successor_ for an honest assessment of our failings."

"She isn't lying, Misato."

Misato was sitting up now, hallucinated coffins be damned. "I think I agree. C'mon, Doctor Frank, let's hear it from the philly's mouth!"

"Forget it," Ritsuko said flatly. "She's observing real time fluctuations in simulated data streams. Maya can't leave her workstation."

"You Nobel-winning butt munch, you totally made that up!"

"Hey, time out!." Ritsuko paused, her tired, throaty rustle replete with flashing yellow lights and candy cane barriers. "Haven't I listened to every crazy story you've ever had to tell me? No matter how drunk you were? No matter how often it degenerated into some insane rant against Australians? And there were _so_ many rants. I'm not warning you off because I'm being insensitive, it's because I want you to be prudent. You're twenty-nine years old, I mean…_shit._"

Misato's bedroom walls receded and her liquid floor flexed, and then did not. Lashing sea brine laced the air, and then did not. "I have to talk to _someone_…"

"Okay. But think. _Please_ think. You're in enough trouble as it is. I know you don't like holding it in and I wouldn't usually ask you to but…can't you trust me on this?"

Misato swore she had just sunk further into her mattress. She entertained an old, legitimized anger, but it was the new one that almost made her answer _no_. "I…okay. It's just I'm, it's so…okay. Can you tell Maya I'm sorry?"

Thy will be done. "She wants to know if you get OrcMax."

Misato snorted hoggishly. "And she thinks I can afford premium…_because_?"

"Point taken. Dinner tomorrow…tonight, whatever. If you're still up to it, it's on me."

"You said yourself I'm in enough trouble already. Non-emergency transactions are frozen during the weekend, but I'm getting this over with."

"What, that payment to the U.N.?" Ritsuko sounded genuinely confused. Oh lord. "Why don't you just have Mayura do it for you?"

Misato blinked sightlessly. "Ma…yura...?"

"Ichikawa? HQ's financial arbiter…?"

"We have one of those? Goddammit, Akagi, why didn't you tell me earlier?!"

"I tried to. But I couldn't get away from Caspar, so I sicced Kaji on you. You mean he didn't tell you?"

"He was going to, I think..."

Ritsuko sucked in air, giving a circle-is-now-complete _ahhhh._ "No wonder he was limping around the snack lounge. For a second I'd thought he'd thrown his back out again, but this line has been monitored. For security reasons, we have terminated the call. Thank you for your cooperation."

Click.

Smiling flaccidly in the dark, Misato slowly began to register the loss of Ritsuko's subtle, skipping inflections, her muted empathy.

The termination of service, as smooth and continuous as a snapped femur.

Snapped.

"What the fuck?! All she said was _second_!" The phone was exploding against a hard far shadow before Misato could stop herself. "Big Fucking Brother! _It happened to me!_"

* * *

It happened to her.

The world had scattered to the right, where buildings and people, dog-eared turboprops and bits of people reduced to flotsam trapped in tumbling iridescent waves. Then freezing. Then poised and quivering on a pinhead of time before they had hurtled perfectly backwards, un-mutilating like sentient jigsaw puzzles. In the soundtrack of life, they had been Lucifer on your forty-fives.

Misato had spent two years saying nothing, memorizing every godless lyric before asking for a chicken burrito. The orderly on duty had appropriately gaped at her, silently gobbled air, and then dutifully collapsed, inconsolable.

She never did get that burrito.

The intervening years before she'd imposed herself on Ritsuko Akagi were half-erected memories of physical and voice therapy. She'd endured the requisite counseling sessions and insurgent clutches of acne. She had tolerated what's-his-face if only for the fact that his clumsy, fevered groping had transpired in the backseat of his Alpine 310, the Cadillac of cars.

Maybe she truly had talked so much because she'd been making up for time lost in that soul deprivation chamber, and Ritsuko hadn't disagreed. But in Kyoto, over those bowls of pork ramen, Misato had seen transmissions churning behind relucent, green eyes; the Akagi girl had been lost in the logistics of loss.

Ritsuko had had to account for the smiling, faceless doctors and the untenured physiatrists that had combed through Misato's mind and failed to diagnose We're All Gonna Die. And there had been the students that had drank or felt their way up to the discolored secret stitched over her solar plexus.

It was a deceptively hard sum; no one had ever been so cruel or twisted as to blame Misato for what had happened to their pretty first worlds. Just enough to remove her from them. They'd have never let Misato talk her way out of September 13 had it meant they'd be talked back into it.

Ritsuko Akagi's answer had been a newly minted smile with crisp edges.

A week and a day later, they were arguing over refrigerated panties in their demilitarized university flat.

* * *

What guy?

* * *

Ritsuko was so far away now, and those fucking robots had spoiled so much, that they could barely hold a conversation together. It left Misato no recourse but to peel back her embroidered curtains and look outside and try to feel lied to when she spotted freckles of light on the dormant valley floor. And not just there, but clustered in the steel cores of skyscrapers like fireflies in termite terraces.

That liaison to Tokyo Electric, he hadn't said anything about people having back up generators, had he? And why bother when the lights were so few and far between? When you'd have as much of a chance of feeling the warmth of tardy constellations shivering from across space?

These weren't warming lights, anyway.

* * *

Snapped.

* * *

TEPCO had apparently sanctioned them to unsnap from the electric grid, flaking from windows and SHD flat screens, open fridges. Their specialty was making Misato say please god no god please. Or something like that.

This was their method: They jittered alone, waltzed in pairs, and flocked in ten-watt murders as they swarmed the lighted spires downtown. They kissed each other and pooled like liquid suns. They rose into luminous nightmare chutes of real estate just so she could feel lied to.

But nothing could ever live in them without being smelted down into a puddle of bubbling screams. Your part was to wait patiently until they pissed away all their earthbound pretenses and decimated you, sent you sprawling across boiling polar shoals. They were predictable that way. They were beautiful that way.

Misato was crushed at 3:17 am on the button. She was Japanese, after all.

* * *

Able Seaman Joseph Braxton At Your Service My Young Miss had shallow water eyes and a shovel spade chin and Misato finally had to tell him she wasn't Korean in the King's English. He nodded, and when he asked her what she'd like to eat she said she wasn't really sure, she'd think about it. He excavated fertile clumps of air with his jaw.

Misato shut the curtains, swore fluently in three languages, and then swore fluently in four languages, and both were preferable to crashing through the window to clip the wings in the sky above Tokyo-3. Especially when she could just drive down there herself.

Besides, her room had been infiltrated with the miasma of gasoline and pulverized cattle. Fresh air would do her good.

She stepped towards the door and absently breathed down the sobs inflaming her throat with overpressured words.

* * *

SHE'S MORE CAT THAN A TRANQUED MANX.

* * *

Asuka had questions and short simmering breaths as she stood between Misato Katsuragi and the hallway. "More cat than a _what_?"

"Can I get by?"

"Don't ignore me, you hypocrite. How am I supposed to get to sleep when you keep _saying_ things?"

"Shinji didn't seem to have a problem getting to sleep. Odd. Can I get by?"

"That idiot wouldn't complain if he was bitten on the cheek by a Gaboon Viper," Asuka decided. "He's probably suffocating himself with his pillow right now."

"So you've stabbed him, thrown heavy objects at him, and now he's a coward and an idiot. Maybe you're just upset that no one's eating _you_." The short, simmering breaths stopped. "I _so_ order you to forget I said that."

"What the hell's your problem, anyway?! Are you afraid of the dark or something?"

"Right, Asuka. That's it. I'm _terrified_…" Misato laughed. She could've been patting a pit bull's head. By then, she'd triangulated Asuka's position and was skirting her soft edges. And then wasn't.

"How did it happen?"

* * *

It was the horrible luck to survive the initial blast and the crippled VTOL that slammed into the south embankment of Showa Station. Rabid engines gibbered and spat glowing red flecks towards the humans liberally scattered throughout the corridor like poseables in an arsonist's diorama.

It was braiding together loose strands of breath, scrambling outside through the fire-rimmed aperture in the compound wall. It could have been courage; the dying machine hemorrhaged jet fuel onto the scrabbled floor, so probably not. It was just as well, because nothing else was.

It was warm outside.

Category Six thermals juggled ATVs and sheet metal roofs, telephone poles and biplanes. She waited to be gambled with them in roaring mile-high tumblers, for the broken action figures in the station to join her in the end-world monsoon. When the VTOL detonated, parts of them did.

It was being shanked in the chest by a phantom inmate. Falling so far back, away from a place where she was allowed to get up. Electric vortices curled past the shrapnel sunk between her breasts, coursing over her tongue and spewing out mindlessly. It was her fading laughter as red ochre gurgled up to irrigate her parka's fleece lining.

Her father's face was dark and sallow even as the surrounding unconsciousness receded, but only long enough to count all the things that were wrong in his eyes. Fifty-seven.

It was standing in the capsule, hunched and bouncing incessantly on black, elastic waves, her mutinous cells reconciling with an awful, chitinous opera. It was desiccated wings hydrating on a thermonuclear horizon.

It was beautiful.

She dared not say so to the Aussie accompaniment aboard the_Arunta_-not with their faces carved into incredulous pink monoliths.

_Is she it?_

The ship's doctor stitched her up with a dozen dozen sutures, sealing her off from burning, shredding externalities-a splendid concept. It was terribly upsetting that one-hundred and forty-four did not go evenly into fifty-seven, and poor enlisted Joe Braxton did his best to console her. He'd been ordered to, after all, and the Perthite had a daughter nearly her age. He'd told her so about 2.53 times.

But there are only so many ways you can ask a girl what she'd like to eat before you sigh and take your leave.

So you see, Asuka, it kinda happened like that.

Your turn.

* * *

"What guy?"

Misato did the prudent thing. She stopped talking. And Asuka, propped opposite of her in the hallway, dropped the baton. Perfect. The girl hadn't heard a word she'd said. Misato had sat there spilling her guts out, wanting her father but resigned to Kaji's face whether or not she closed her eyes, and Asuka had been asleep the whole time. What an immensely disheartening…

"It's not what you think, Misato."

…relief.

Asuka sniffed at her, "It's nothing, alright? Just that Bunpei asshole that lives down the hall."

Bunpei was this asshole that lived down the hall. He was short on decorum, long on scratched, bifocaled evil eyes, and one chicken tempura short of being legally overweight. He had no discernable occupation. But he had parents, and that counted for enough to at least pay rent. Apparently, it cost nothing to be a lazy dick.

Bunpei lost things. Cell phones. Sneakers. Potato chips. Hair. Clock radios. Toe nail clippers. Finger nail clippers. Hair clippers. Paper clips. Paper weights. Fuchsia lipstick. His temper, but only when he found his courage, which in itself was inversely proportional to the age of the alleged perpetrator.

Fun fact! Lots of fun things didn't happen when you called Asuka Langley Sohryu a child.

"He said I stole his car keys," started Asuka.

Misato blinked madly. "I didn't even know he owned a car."

"He doesn't."

Misato stopped blinking. "Oh."

"What _is_ that touching me?"

"Sorry." Misato drew her leg up. Pop rocks crackled in her ratcheted joints. "You…didn't do anything expensive to him…did you?"

"I just insinuated where he could insert his keys if they ever turned up. Strongly. Then I walked away." Asuka took a seething half-breath, and then set her self on 'kill'. "I won't do that again. Next time he says I took his…_MacGuffin_, or whatever, I'm just going to steal a piece of his ass and be done with it. No questions asked."

"Why even bother?" Misato yawned. Too little too late. "He does this to everyone and from what I've heard, nothing's ever come of it. He _still_ thinks I stole his Sega Genesis."

"You're old-ow!"

Misato retracted her foot and fanned herself with a flippered hand. "Look, I don't like telling you to do things and you don't like me telling you to do things. Aren't you above all this?"

Asuka gave the maple floorboards a low-caliber slap. "But that's what gets on my nerves! Who the hell is this joker to look down on_me_? Fucking loser. How many times have I nearly died out there so he can fap his life away to little girls in maid outfits?"

"So you like it, then?"

"Uh…" Asuka could only have been staring. "Do…do I _like_ that he jerks off to-"

"Piloting, Asuka."

"Is this a trick question?"

"I'm just wondering about the big show you put on whenever you suit up."

Then there was that canned, disembodied laughter that Sohryu insisted on trotting out. "What do you mean? Might as well bring all the noise I possibly can. It isn't like they can do anything about-oh _right_…" Asuka snapped her fingers. "They can ship me back to _Bavaria_…"

What _was_ this, Throw Everything Back In Misato's Face Day?

"You don't feel even a bit silly taking what I said at face value?" asked Misato.

"I'll tell you what's silly…" Asuka's throat closed and opened with a damp squelch. "Someone who scores two and a half kills with exactly _zero_ hours of training in a simulated body."

The confrontation had just turned blessedly relevant and real.

Real old.

"_Oh for_-just treat the boy like he has a soul and we stop having problems."

"You're the one with the problem."

"Why is it so hard for you to see his side of things?"

"Because he already has _you_ to see his side of things." The Child's silhouette collapsed in on itself, absorbing all the petty, righteous jealousies hanging in the air as she muttered, "You_always_ take his side…"

"It only seems that way." Misato leaned from the wall, over her throbbing kneecaps. "Passive sonar, active sonar."

It was Asuka's turn to kick her-_hard_. "For the love of metatarsals, it's like you made a deal with Devil Sasquatch!"

"He's not like you. He hates it here. I don't…I just want to make him comfortable." Misato slowly shook her head, mindful of the volatility. "I thought you didn't need me to do that for you."

"I don't."

"You've lost me, then." The Captain was on, now, skimming the part of her brain that saved her job more often than she'd ever admit. "Me, Shinji, random jerks in our apartment complex…you're keeping this running tab of IOUs for…I don't know, what? I thought you enjoyed piloting."

"I do."

"Whose sympathy are you trying to buy, Asuka? Mine?"

"No one's."

"Shinji's?"

"Let it go."

"I seem to recall someone telling me to take my own advice."

"Yet here you are," Asuka grumbled, "screwing with me."

"Good thing, too," said Misato. "Who knew that all this time you've spent bragging about what a hot-shit ace you are, you were actually feeling sorry for yourself?"

"I'm _not_-forget it..." Asuka's shape freeze-dried. Melted and sighed. Was pulled tall and taut as she stood and faded away to her room, a citizen in a city of shadows. "I'm tired. And you need to clip your toenails. Goodnight."

"Do you think you can afford to give people like Bunpei a second thought?" Asuka's door hadn't scraped open. She was waiting there, just beyond the edge of Misato's senses. "You, in particular? I can't imagine you not knowing the answer to that, because _I_ do. I think Shinji does. And even if we don't always act on-"

"I know." Layers of fabric sheared against Asuka's skin. She was folding her arms.

"The next time he goes out of his way to pick a fight with you, could you keep in the back of your mind, just for half a second, why it'd be in your best interest to just try and let it go…? Possibly…? Maybe…?"

"…maybe."

"That's good enough. Thank you, Asuka. Thank you." Progress was one of those precious metals that Misato gleaned only after panning mountains of accumulated failure and ignorance and stupidity. She practically was this debris of life. She went years between outbreaks of it, never figuring out how to approach it anyway but asymptotically. That was why it was so different from the rest of her life. For her, progress existed outside of birthdays, anniversaries, and death certificates. Only in Infinity was she allowed to horde- "Now let's go fuck with him!"

* * *

It was when they had finally regrouped at what Misato sincerely hoped was the front door that she decided to sew up one last fissure.

"You wouldn't really hurt Rei…would you?"

"Not even if you ordered me to," said Asuka, putting on a strained sigh. "Now sound off, already."

"That's okay. I'm pretty sure we got everything we need."

"So we need…" Asuka was rummaging, "these binoculars?"

Misato nodded. "Yep."

"And these bolt cutters?"

"Uh huh."

"And the tracker phones?"

"Yup."

"And the Superdeformed Hydrocephalic Hello Kitty Paperweights? Official highlights from the 2008 World Series of Scotch? The jar full of cinnamon, buck urine and penguin farts? _All the matches?_"

"_Yes_, Asuka, _all_ of them." Misato shook her head. "Christ, it's like you're running for Vice Snitch."

"I _will_ if you don't open that stupid door. This wheel barrow's heavy!"

Misato tried. She did, really. "I -_ergh_- it's stuck!"

"Misato, _Gawd_…" What followed from Asuka was a brief, yet shockingly condescending impromptutorial on the emergency push-button door release, standard in all Japanese public housing units with automated egress, and which bled the compressed air from pneumatic door actuators in the wall. What followed _that_ was a cogent and academically rigorous argument for why, without Asuka, Misato Katsuragi would eventually choke to death on something round and shiny.

"I'll show _you_ something round and shiny…"

"I need to see in order for that to happen," said Asuka. "Agreed?"

Agreed, grudgingly. Misato expedited the only logical conclusion with a back fist to the large corrugated button housed in a wall panel at shoulder height. She heard a searing mechanical hiss between the steel jambs, and held her breath as the metal aperture screen-wiped to reveal the total lunar stillness on the tenth floor. Misato supposed it'd be the only time she'd ever feel like an EVA specialist.

She took one small step.

Ironically enough, it wasn't until she turned back to look on Asuka's darkening face that Misato realized how much lighter it was outside.

"OH MY GOTT! WHY AREN'T YOU WEARING ANY CLOTHES?!"

End of Single Point of Failure

A/N: Fresh C had reviewed this the first time it was posted, and made some extremely valid points. I made some changes, and in all likelihood, will make more. It's meant to be a short, simple story, really. I'm not trying to confuse anyone. Honest.

Random A/N: Suckers.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

What do you mean they can still read this?


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